While this humor of unrest still hung over him he took down his brightly bound copy of The Silver Poppy and read it through studiously, from first to last. The sense of its exceptional power came to him once more, as a revelation reiterated. He found it a book where the gleaner caught at much which the more hurried harvester must miss, a book yielding, as he felt all good books should yield, a new and unexpected delight in its second reading. Outside the manifest strength and movement of the story there was the secondary charm of a quiet and masterly touch. Its satire was delightful and insidious, and through its merriest pages he found the Touchstone-like pensiveness of one who knew and understood a sad old wag of a world. He found in it, too--and this puzzled him most--still that sense of eternally saving humor of which he had seen so little in Cordelia herself. From page to page it flashed out at him, it tripped him up, and danced about him. He began to understand the better why The Silver Poppy had been called one of the novels of the year, even of the century. He thought he saw now just what Cordelia had meant when she had timorously asked him if he thought it possible that she had written herself out in one book. That early, crocus-like flowering of the spirit was no less beautiful because it was already over and gone with the April of life. Where in that little body had such wisdom and power once been packed away? She had always seemed such a fragile, shell-tinted thing to him, the wonder was that she had written a book at all, that in one eloquent interval she had found a voice, and delivered her message. But was that one work alone to stand the key to that strangely reticent soul of hers? Had she, as with those little East Side fruit-shops he knew so well, ranged all her stock in trade out on the public sidewalk, and left empty the store itself? The thought of a bewildered but aspiring artist, caged in a body so incongruously frail and girlish, filled him with a pity for the sorrowing laborer struck helpless in the midst of her work--for the writing hand fallen helpless in the midst of its dreams. He suddenly felt that he should be willing to go through fire and water to bring one laurel leaf to that small, proudly poised head with its profusion of yellowish golden hair. And with this mood the grayness seemed to go out of the world. And still again he asked himself if this could be love.